The development team behind the open-source AI inference optimisation project vLLM has received venture capital backing and turned itself into a startup called Inferact.
Inferact recently raised $150 million in seed funding and was valued at $800 million, TechCrunch reported on Jan. 22.
The funding round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Inferact’s move is similar to the recently commercialised SGLang project. SGLang recently raised funding at a $400 million valuation in a round led by Accel.
As the AI industry’s centre of gravity shifts from model training to actual application deployment, known as inference, technologies such as vLLM and SGLang are drawing investors’ attention, TechCrunch reported.
Inferact CEO Simon Mo (사이먼 모) told Bloomberg in an interview that "Amazon Web Services and shopping apps are using vLLM."
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr